Dual Booting on the e6400: Part Three – Setting Up Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex

Posted by Johnny on April 5th, 2009 filed in Guides, Technology

Similar to the XP Setup post, I won’t be covering the actual Intrepid installation (which is made incredibly easy by the guided install). I’ll be going over the major pieces of software I installed, and finishing up with some comments about various issues I ran into. Note that this guide is written under the assumption that one has some understanding of how to use a *nix OS, with much of the information coming from the Ubuntu Intrepid Ipex Guide

I must also apologize for how long it took to publish this post. I wasn’t (in fact, I’m still not) satisfied with the formatting of this post, which kept me from putting it out for you all to see. But I noticed a lot of people reading the previous two in the dual boot series, and figured some of you might be wanting part three (seeing comments would have resulted in a faster post folks :p)

Some Notes Before You Start

Software can either be installed with sudo apt-get install in a terminal, or via System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager. Choose the one that suits your fancy – I generally use the Package Manager, opting for the terminal when it’s easier to just copy and paste a large list of software. Enabling additional repositories is also easier via the Package Manager, and can be done by going to Settings -> Repositories, where I generally enable all of them (main, universe, restricted, and multiverse). Additional repositories can be added by selecting the Third-Party Software tab and clicking add, entering the apt line in the window that pops up.

Essential Software

For those with laptop specs similar to mine, there are two pieces of software that I consider must-haves.

NVIDA Graphics Driver

Intrepid should ask you when you first log in if you wish to enable the driver. If it doesn’t, you can install it manually by going to System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers and selecting the appropriate version. Note that you’ll probably have to agree to allowing the installation of proprietary drivers.

gsynaptics

This is the touchpad driver and software, found under the gsynaptics package. After the installation is complete, you can configure your touchpad by going to System -> Preferences -> Touchpad.

Highly Recommended Software

Sensors Applet and i8kutil

Both of these are applications for monitoring your system. Sensors Applet is a GUI applet that can be added to your toolbar (listed as Hardware Sensors Monitor), displaying various system component temperatures. Installing i8kutil will enable monitoring similar to the Windows-only i8kfanGUI, reading fan speeds in addition to component temperatures. These can be found under sensors-applet and i8kutil, respectively. In order to enable i8kutil monitoring though, two additional steps must be taken. After installing, open up a terminal and run

sudo modprobe i8k

sudo vim /etc/modules

Add i8k to that file, save and close.

Ubuntu Restricted Extras

This package pulls in a number of commonly used packages including various media codecs, the Flash plugin, Java runtime, and Microsoft fonts (like Arial and Verdana). Note that, as the package name (ubuntu-restricted-extras) suggests, these are pulled in from the restricted and multiverse repositories and may have certain restrictions on their usage.

Eye Candy

Avant Windows Manager

This enables a highly configurable and skinnable Mac-like dock for your OS. Check out the Avant Windows Manager section in the Ubuntu guide for installation steps. A number of themes can be found on the AWN wiki page.

Compiz

Less functional and much more eye-candy, this enables anything from glossier windows to fancy animations and effects when modifying windows (such as on resize, move, or minimize). Check out the section on installing Compiz in the guide.

A Few Notes and Tips

I leave you with some notes and tips about situations I ran into, that my readers may find useful. I make references in several tips to sda#. This refers to the ID of the particular partition that you’re working with – one way to find this if you know your partition sizes is by looking at System -> Administration -> System Monitor. Then under the File Systems tab, locate the device name matching the proper size.

Bug: Firefox toolbar config not saved

Anyone that notices Firefox not saving their toolbar customizations when opening a new window can try disabling the Ubuntu Firefox Modifications plugin. Designed to integrate things like your system theme and apt support into Firefox (and thus not essential), it caused my Firefox to forget my toolbar config in certain situations.

Changing your inode size

As mentioned in part one, some of you may want to mount your Ubuntu partitions in Windows and find themselves unable to do so because of Intrepid’s 256 byte inodes. Those unable to use the simpler method of partitioning with Hardy Heron and GParted can try the steps I used myself for modifying my /home partition:

1. Zip up /home and store it on an external drive. Zipping the partition allows one to preserve some files that would otherwise not be copyable, such as certain symlinks.
2. Reboot with a live cd
3. Run mkfs.ext3 -I 128 /dev/sda# inside a terminal, where sda# is the ID of the /home partition.
4. Unzip the file from step 1 back into /home.
5. Run

   chown -R <username>:<username> /home/<username>

   chmod 644 /home/<username>/.dmrc /home/<username>/.IDCEauthority

6. Find the UUID of the partition (as it will have changed after having run mkfs) by doing sudo vol_id -u /dev/sda#
7. sudo vim /etc/fstab and update the line representing /home with the new UUID.

Tip: Adding fonts

Installing new fonts in previous versions of Ubuntu could be easily accomplished by dragging the font file into the system’s fonts folder. This folder needs to be manually created in Intrepid, which can be done in the terminal by running mkdir ~/.fonts.

Tip: Keeping your system clean

Your Ubuntu system can become pretty messy after some use, with things like unused dependencies remaining after uninstalling packages. These unused dependencies can be removed by running sudo apt-get autoremove Similarly, upgrading to new Linux kernels will start to clog up the grub boot loader with multiple kernel choices. If you wish to remove these, simply uninstall the relevant kernel packages, usually consisting of a linux-headers-<version>, linux-headers-<version>-generic, linux-restricted-modules-<version>, and linux-image-<version>-generic package. More tips on cleaning your system clean can be found in this Make Tech Easier post.

Tip: Sharing Pidgin logs between XP and Intrepid

Doing this requires permanently mounting your Windows partition in Ubuntu (this can also be done in Windows instead, but creating symlinks was too complicated for me to bother with). Determine the name of your Windows partition, and then, opening up /etc/fstab in an editor, add /dev/<device name> /windows ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0